My Sister Aine

by: MauraHennessey

Thu Aug 21, 2008 at 09:10:29 AM EDT

Aine.

She is the good daughter, the one who avoided scandals, the baby of the family. The married daughter who sings in a choir, the daughter who brought no shame to our parents, the daughter whose childhood was unmarked by the various events that shaped who I am now.

Aine is an attorney as well. That choice brought her some degree of heat from my mother and father, who had spent years warning her "don't be like Maureen" or "see what that kind of thing did to Maureen." Aine is happily married, with two children and a husband who is an Ivy League attorney, graduate of a famous law school and worse, another banking attorney though she herself specialises in appellate law.

Again, she is the "good daughter," the one that my parents mention when they discuss children, though we are the only two survivors of the five siblings. Dealing with issues involving my parents a few weeks ago, we had lunch afterwards at a pub that my parents, brothers and sister frequented for years as they were friendly with the owners.  My sister introduced me to one of those owners, who had no idea, after knowing my parents for years, that there was an older daughter at all.

Because of an older brother's demanding illness, I was raised by my grandmere. I did not lack for love; my aunt and my grandmother were wonderful to me up until the time that I was 14 when I was involved in my first scandal. I smoked, and I parrotted my grandmothers views and my aunt's views on women's issues while attending a national (public) school in  what was still the dead de Valera's Ireland, meaning that the school was basically run by the local priest.

That alcoholic gentleman, who died in an asylum from alcohol induced dementia, had a huge antipathy for my grandmother, better educated than he was, and my aunt, an out Lesbian living primarily in Paris. However, both of those worthies were beyond his reach; I was not. Towards the end of of my eighth academic year, he signed papers certifying that I was at "grave moral risk" and one afternoon I was spirited away by two Mercy Sisters to Dublin, to an establishment on Sean McDermott Street known as the "Gloucester Street Laundry." It was legal, it was all part of "God's law guiding the law of the nation." And it made me a prisoner-penitent with no rights, no recourse, no hope and no future.

I was not there that long. I was not there long enough to have the lifeless "dolls eyes" that are by and large the mark of the "Maggies" who survived the horror that only ended with the closure of  the Sean McDermott facility in 1996. I was there long enough to aquire long scars on the back of my left hand from blocking the blow of a Sister who was trying to strike me with a stone set of rosary beads wrapped around her fist as punctiation to an argument that she had with me.

They take away your name in such a place; you have only a number, and you are sentenced to  work and to silence except for prayer. I used to commit an act of defiance by silently tracing my name over and over on steamed windows when no one was looking. That act cost me those scars.

It was all legal, it was, again, the practical application of God's laws guiding a nation.

I escaped sexual abuse there, some did not. We had no classes, no instruction other than working the 19th century equipment to clean clerical robes, altar clothes, and press the Sister's habits, the symbol of the Church's de-sexualisation of women and their quiescent submission.

I was finally released  a number of months later, a few scars, a lot of anger but still in possession of my sense of self and not reduced to a spiritless, hollow shell as so many of my "sisters" there were. The condition of my release was that my parents take me back, rather than continuing my grandmother's gauardianship of me. My parents embarrassment at having to enroll a daughter in a local school with the entry "Industrial School for Girls" and "Reason: Grave Moral Risk" on my academic transcript was the cause of the length of my stay at Gloucester Street.

From the moment of my arrival, I was the example used for Aine as what not to be. Needless to say, I did not last long at my parents. Long, tearful lettres to my grandmother and to my aunt resulted in my being placed in a boarding school in the UK; the waning power of the Church by the mid 1980's made my return to my grandmother's for visits possible and ended the unpleasantness of summers with my parents who, while indulging Aine and my brothers, had me take the most menial jobs during the summer that they could find for me with the longest hours. I predicatbly rebelled providing my parents with even more reasons to remind Aine  "don't be like Maureen."

We were not close, Aine and I. I was the "anti-Aine" and she was most favoured child. I was far closer to my motorcycle riding, rebellious, music major at a University brother. Him, I loved. Aine, I tolerated.

With my parent's encouragement, primarily encouragement that I go as far away as possible, I decided to attend University on the continent of Europe, in Spain. My parents attended my robing when I took my doctorate, though my father by and large used the occasion to let people know that I had been a Magdalen and what a "screw up" I was. That has remained a constant in our relationship to this day.

Decades have now passed. Aine and I are the only ones left. Our brothers are now long dead and gone to dust. With the coming out of one of her sons, and her sudden conversion to "PFLAG Momma" my sister is far prouder of me and is attemting to build  relationship with me.

She feels sorry that I never had the loving father/daughter relationship that she knew, that I by and large worked my way through school, that I have never developed a sense of "home" and that I "wandered through Europe" as she puts it."

Aine stood up, when asked at the pub the identity of the redhaired woman that she was with and said, clearly and perhaps a bit loudly "this is my older sister Maureen. She was the bravest and the brightest of us and the one my dad sent to exile in Europe."

When the owner remarked, amazed, that my parents had never mentioned me, Aine responded "Dad was afraid that I would be like Maureen. And I hope that I am."

I've wandered in this set of musings. I have to call Aine today, to tell her a number of things that may upset her, primarily that I am resigning my job to re-join the ICT out of a sense of duty and obligation and that this will probably kill my marriage.  Still, after the call, I am hoping that my sister will still be proud of me and perhaps have a few second thoughts about wanting to be "like Maureen."

No matter what, she will still be my sister, Aine.